Senator Coburn recently remarked that the recent order by Obama, ordering all employers to offer health insurance that covers birth control, sterilizations and abortion pills, regardless of any religious objections….is not that big a deal:

“This is blown out of proportion,” he said. “It is an important point in terms of religious liberty, but it’s a consequence of having too big of a government.”

I don’t agree that it’s blown out of proportion but I do agree on the reasons why no one should be surprised.

This was what ObamaCare was about in the first place. To place every American under the power of the federal government. To rule every aspect of your life. It’s just another power grab by the federal government, and this Administration, at the expense of the States and the individual.

Daniel Henninger:

The Catholic Church has stumbled into the central battle of the 2012 presidential campaign: What are the limits to Barack Obama’s transformative presidency? The Catholic left has just learned one answer: When Mr. Obama says, “Everyone plays by the same set of rules,” it means they conform to his rules. What else could it mean?

This battle is to repeal ObamaCare, plain and simple.

Oh wait, Romney is going to be our nominee…

Nevermind.

Exit quote:

“We are all familiar with an individual mandate that was authorized by the U.S. Congress and notoriously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court: the affirmative duty of persons of Japanese descent to report to a Civil Control Station. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1943). The distinction between mere prohibition and command played a large role in the internment cases. . . . Korematsu is a perfectly fine precedent: it has never been overruled. Moreover, it is the feds’ best and only precedent. So why don’t they cite it?”

Congress has a penchant for passing toothless legislation, especially as it affects them. The STOCK Act is no exception. STOCK stands for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge. There is enthusiasm for such a law.

Fervor over insider trading on Capitol Hill reached a peak last fall following the airing of a “60 Minutes” segment questioning whether lawmakers including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) made investments based on their knowledge of legislative activity to which they would be privy.

Pelosi and other lawmakers named in the piece disputed any allegation of impropriety, but a number of lawmakers in the meanwhile proposed versions of the STOCK Act to address any perception of poor ethics.

Senate democrats are eager to prove something- despite failing to produce a budget for more than 1000 days.

Today during a conference call, Sens. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) each said the STOCK act was important to pass to remind the American people that Congress can actually achieve something.

“The American people need to know that their elected leaders play by the exact same rules that they play by,” Gillibrand told reporters, “We have to show, number one: we’re not above the law, number two: that we play by the same exact rules as every other american, and three: that we can actually get something done.”

We’ll see about that.

Republicans in the House do not approve of the bill as it was passed in the Senate. They feel it is weak.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Tuesday criticized the Senate legislation as weak. His staff said he would move a strengthened version of the bill to the House floor at the end of the month.

Senators voted for an amendment Thursday to expand the legislation’s reporting requirements to members of the executive branch.

The legislation would mandate that lawmakers report all major transactions within 30 days and file financial disclosure reports electronically.

But there was a limit to the Senate’s self-discipline:

But lawmakers defeated several proposals to significantly reform the perks and powers critics charge have a corrupting influence on Capitol Hill.

Senators voted down a bipartisan proposal to permanently ban earmarks as well as an amendment to require lawmakers and senior staff to divest of stocks or put their stock holdings in blind trusts.

The amendment sponsored by Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to permanently ban earmarks failed by a vote of 40-59.

But this was particularly egregious

Senators defeated another amendment sponsored by Paul to prohibit executive branch appointees and staff from having oversight, rule-making, and loan- or grant-making authority over companies in which they or their spouses have significant financial interest.

The amendment was designed to guard against the alleged improprieties stemming from the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar-panel manufacturer that received more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees.

Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) demonstrated once more the contempt Congress holds for voters:

“We tried to focus at the specific task at hand, closing loopholes to ensure that members of Congress play by the exact same rules as everyone else,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a sponsor of the legislation.

Cue Peter Schweizer. Schweizer noticed something about the success of Senatorial investing:

Schweizer: Well, you know, somebody sent me an article that appeared in an academic journal a few years ago. It’s a journal called the Journal of Quantitative Economics. If you have trouble sleeping at night, this might be a good place to go.

But this study was actually very interesting, because these scholars looked at 6,000 stock trades by U.S. senators, and what they found, shockingly, was that while the average American tends to underperform the market averages, the average corporate executive beats the market by 5% a year and the average hedge fund beats the market by 7 to 8% a year. This study found that U.S. senators beat the market by 12% a year…

Schweizer: Yeah. And so, it left me wondering, you know: “OK, gee. Either these guys are really, really smart geniuses that I don’t give them enough credit for, or something else is going on.” And it really only took me a split second to say, “You know, I think something else is going on.”

Hill: And again, there’s so much research that you and your team did for this book. How did you go about connecting the dots?

Schweizer: Well, you know, it was very difficult. What we really wanted to do was show and sort of overlay the financial transactions of members of Congress. They’re required to disclose them once a year. They’re required to show what their holdings are and also the dates of transactions, but they only give the amounts in ranges, so you don’t know exactly how much money they’re trading.

But we took that material, and then we looked at their legislative activity or things that were going on where they had access to special information. Like for example, during the 2008 financial crisis, they had a lot of closed-door meetings with the Fed chairman and Treasury secretary. And once we overlaid those, we found, astonishingly, that people who served on financial committees were aggressively trading bank stocks. Those that were involved in the health-care bill, the health-care reform debate in 2009 were aggressively buying and selling all sorts of health care-related stocks, and it was kind of stunning. So, once we had this overlay, then we started to track to see what sort of investment decisions they were making and how they did in terms of those investments.

Yet this bill is sorely lacking. Why?

Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi’s net worth skyrocketed 62% in 2010. How?

Insider trading. Specifically- taking advantage of IPO’s. And what doesn’t this proposed law cover?

IPO’s.

The passage of the STOCK Act in the Senate is just the first battlefield victory in this war for reform. The STOCK Act makes congressional insider-trading illegal. But let’s be clear: it alone doesn’t go nearly far enough to deal with the problems of cronyism and corruption that we face. It deals only with publicly traded stock, not equity buys in private companies. It does nothing to close the sweetheart deals involving IPO shares that can make politicians more money in one day than a bribe ever could. And insider-trading cases are very hard to win. On top of that, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department are unlikely to go after a powerful politician. Just look at what happened to the FBI when they were investigating Rep. William Jefferson, who famously took bribes and put the money in his freezer. There were threats to cut the FBI budget!

So when Pelosi says she backs the STOCK ban, believe it. It won’t stop her from abusing the American people.

Which is why this is not the insider trading ban you were looking for.

A Previous Subtle Effort By The Same Obama Propagandists

How symbolic, the red and blue spheres merge and the resultant color is a deeper shade of blue. Propaganda is considered effective if it is subtle and delivers a covert or subliminal message without the subject being aware of the intent. In this image, the profile of Obama was superimposed over the merging of Conservatism and Socialism with the profile of Obama and the result is a deeper shade of blue; picturesque and convenient, Obama brings the country together and we are united under a deeper shade of Marxism. It was created by the same team that made the Chrysler commercial; it hasn’t achieved fruition, but not for a lack of effort by Obama and his lackeys.

Our public school systems have been infiltrated with the Leftist Part Line for decades. At first the message was so vague, we thought it was merely coincidences, teachers and text writers surely couldn’t be so blatant and obvious with their political agenda; oh, but think back, while we refused to call liars and Socialists as such, they increased their efforts and relied on terrorists like Bill Ayers, confidant to our president, for the Leftist message now in our children’s text books.

Now, either Eastwood has allowed himself to be duped like a moron or he is a part of the deception; regardless of his intent, he has been used as a key element in the Leftist propaganda movement. Unfortunately, we have all been played for dupes by the creative schemers of the Left for while Eastwood tells America we are at the halftime of the recovery, during the halftime of the largest event in television history, the insidious message is implied that America needs to give Obama four more years to complete his anemic recovery, that seems to elude everyone but billionaires, bankers, and others on the dole.

The fact that Chrysler is staging a fart, stumble, fall type recovery based mainly on enriching Obama cronies and unions with our taxpayer money is pushed from our consciousness; since, we receive the subliminal message to equate the auto maker’s efforts with our fight against terrorism, the struggle of Obama to win reelection, and the struggle of the two athletic teams. In the excitement of the neo-gladitorial struggle portrayed on the boob tube, we are supposed to lose ourselves in the excitement and intellectual numbness of the game, much like the games in Rome that staged to entertain the masses or the mob in Rome to keep them content and less likely to riot. Thus in a similar way, we are played for fools by the people who stage our games; no they aren’t staged to prevent us from rioting, but what an excellent time to exploit our self-imposed stupor to insinuate a covert message to reelect our failed president by one of his corporate acquisitions, with a percentage of Obama’s funny stash money, more commonly known as tax payer money.

Oh, but you say the message is vague and imprecise, how can you make the connection: sorry people, the message is supposed to be vague and imprecise, it is supposed to leave a subliminal impression that will encourage the mobs of unthinking drones to vote for Obama once again; after all, hasn’t he struggled valiantly to repay his contributors and unions with taxpayer money, at least when he can find time between golf games and vacations. The fact that the connection is obvious to those who are alert and cognizant means the message is there. If you want to deny it, like Eastwood who so gallantly gave his check to charity, but also willingly gave his image and voice to the Marxism of Obama, means you either endorse the Socialist cause or you are to dense to notice the ever deepening pool of Obama Socialism.

Didn’t take long for the establishment spin to begin:

Republican Sen. John McCain downplayed Tuesday’s election results and placed the blame for Mitt Romney’s losses on low voter turnout.

“I think this really was very small numbers of people that turned out and I respect their views, but I don’t believe they are representative of the broad majority of Republican voters,” McCain said Wednesday in an interview set to run on CNN’s “John King USA.” “I really believe that when you have 1% of the registered voters turning out that that’s not a very good indicator.”

This coming from the guy who said:

We have nothing to fear with Barack Obama in the White House

But more importantly the fact that only 1% of registered voters turned IS a good indicator that people care little about Romney, nor the choices given to us in this Republican primary. Given all that I am happy that Santorum shocked the establishment. I’m hoping he continues but as Santorum admitted in a email to supporters, the knives are out:

I know what’s coming next. I saw what Mitt Romney and his team did to Newt Gingrich after he won South Carolina. They amassed millions of dollars for his campaign and his SuperPAC – outspending his opponents nearly 5 to 1! This month will be no exception. They’re going to come after us now–because Romney doesn’t have a clear conservative vision for America that he can run on.

Presidents of both parties have long extolled the virtues of renewable or green energy. But no president has embraced the concept, nor has spent so much taxpayer money on the idea with nothing to show for it but a string of bankrupt companies, as has Barack Hussein Obama. He has even made the idea a cornerstone of his political and environmental platforms. Yet despite dismal failure, his green energy vision remain undaunted, and he continues to spend taxpayer money and offer all manner of provably untrue or conveniently incomplete success stories.

For example, in his State of the Union speech, Obama said, “It was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.” That preposterous claim is completely untrue. Fracking has been used since 1947, and was originally developed by Stanolind Oil and Gas Corporation, and improved by a small-time, independent oil man named George Mitchell.

In the “great timing” department, Obama said, “In three years our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries.” Two days later, Ener1, high-tech battery manufacturer and the recipient of a $118 million federal grant, filed for bankruptcy. But, the Obama administration advisers promise that battery costs will fall. Why do they think that? The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences reported that lithium-ion batteries, like those most used in electric vehicles, is not an “emerging” technology, but is quite mature. Dramatic cost drops are most often associated with new technologies.

Obama’s green-energy program has yielded thousands of jobs. The Department of Energy (DOE) reported that $38.6 billion worth of federally backed loans to green-energy companies has created 3,545 new permanent jobs, with each job costing taxpayers $5 million. It would be much cheaper to have simply supported/subsidized these workers until they died. The wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal industries admit that they would cease to exist without mandated consumption orders and massive production subsidies.

Obama’s DOE predicts that consumption of renewable energy will go from 8.4% of total US energy consumption to 10.8% in 2035, with most of that growth coming from government consumption orders. When we total the billions of taxpayer dollars we’re spending on renewable or green energy, that’s not much of a technological revolution. Technological breakthroughs do occur, often without warning. But there is no reason to believe that President Obama is a better energy future forecaster than are market capitalists who stand to gain billions in profits by making good investments in future technologies So for all you green-energy environmentalists, it’s time to put up (especially your own money) or shut up. Speaking of putting up, environmentalists, why are Chevy Volt sales so dismal?

The recent bankruptcies of DOE green-energy loan recipients and the record of bad DOE bets over the past three years caution taxpayers against future crony paybacks, er, taxpayer-backed loans, er, “investments.” American voters should not confuse hope with certainty.

But that’s just my opinion.

Find more articles like this one at RWNO, my personal web site.

John Boehner can take a hit on this one too. You know that wonderful payroll tax cut? Guess who’s going to pay for it?

(CBS News)Just before Christmas, American workers got a rare gift from Washington politicians – the current payroll tax cut would be extended for two more months.

At the time, both President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner lauded the move to avoid a tax increase for millions of working Americans.

But there’s something the politicians weren’t bragging about – the fact that they’re paying for the two-month tax cut with what has turned into a brand new fee on home buyers.

The new fee is a minimum of one-tenth of 1 percent on Fannie Mae- and Freddie Mac-backed loans, and is likely to go much higher.

It will be imposed for the next 10 years on most mortgages and refinancings and it lasts for the life of the loan.

For every $200,000, it amounts to an extra $15 dollars a month.

It’s bad news for Patty Anderson, who’s buying a home in Virginia.

Anderson will save a couple hundred dollars from having her payroll tax cut extended but her mortgage broker told her the new fee would cost her almost $9,500.

“I was absolutely startled that it would add up to that much,” she said.

The money collected by this tax will go toward social security, right?

Nope.

The $35.7 billion collected in fees won’t go into the Social Security fund to replace the lost payroll tax. It goes to the general treasury where Congress can spend it however they please.

“We had to pass it to find out what was in it” Boehner is rumored to have said. Fingerpointing all around.

CBS News went to Capitol Hill ask what Congress was thinking when they passed the mortgage fee hike. Boehner pointed the finger at the Senate.

“As you’re well aware, this bill came over from the Senate. I don’t know how they justified it. We would rather have offset that two-month extension with reductions in spending,” he said.

But the Senate blamed the House. And Democrats and Republicans blamed each other.

The Obama administration says this won’t hurt much because the knife will be stuck into the taxpayers’ backs slowly.

An Obama administration official defended the mortgage fee, calling it “modest.” She said it’s “unlikely to negatively affect borrowers” because increases “will be phased in over the next two years.”

Patty Anderson doesn’t agree.

“I think it just looks like Washington grabbing more money,” she said.

Yep.

Welcome back, class! As I warned you last time this subject would be painful for you, so strap yourselves in. As you’ve probably noticed with all of the charts and graphs we use that economists love to use pictures to make their points. In this case instead of a picture I’m going to use a hypothetical story to get things started…

Let’s say that at some point during your childhood your mother promises you that if you get straight A’s in school and do all of your chores upon graduation from high school your father will buy you a Ferrari. Needless to say, you are very well motivated to be a good kid. You spend the next few years busting your butt, getting all of your chores done and making whatever sacrifices to your social life that are necessary to get straight A’s. Graduation day comes and you walk up to your father and tell him about the promise your mom made and ask when you’re going to get your new car. Your father looks back at you and asks how you thought the family could ever afford a gift like that. Even with both of your parents working full time your family can only afford to live a pretty modest lifestyle. If you had just looked around you would have understood that there is no way the family could have fulfilled such an outrageous promise.

Having your dream crushed would not go over well, and you are justifiably unhappy for having been duped. Now, where is your frustration directed – at your mom or dad? Even though the fault lies with the person who made the ridiculous promise, chances are that most of your anger is at the person who had to point out the reality of the matter and say “no” to you.

To most of us who live outside of the beltway or state capitols the concept of making outrageous financial promises that can never be kept sounds absolutely insane, and sadly for you this is just basic strategy to win an election.

Before we go any further let’s ensure that everybody understands exactly what an unfunded liability is. Break down the two words:

Unfunded – A desired purchase that one does not have the means to buy based on current finances

Liability – Financial commitment to be paid at a later date

What this means is that every time you decree that something will be paid for with funds that have not been budgeted you are creating what is called an unfunded liability (UL). Be careful – don’t confuse unfunded liabilities with capital expenditures. Capital expenditures (CE) can be defined as purchases that are paid over several years and will appear in outyear budgets. Where CE’s are planned and already factored into future budgets, UL’s are not.

To illustrate this think of a household budget. Sister Babe and I have all of our regular expenses that we pay as we consume them – groceries, utilities, gasoline, clothing, etc. We also have items that we had to finance because we are unable to buy them with cash, such as our car or our home. The car and home are not ULs because we have budgeted for their expenses in future years based on our current income level. We know that based on our salaries we can afford the car and our home, so these are not unfunded liabilities. Now, let’s assume that one of us decides to do something stupid like make a large, unplanned purchase that goes enough beyond our budget that has to be financed with the money from elsewhere. In terms of scope, a cup of Starbucks during the day or going to grab a beer with a coworker after work are not expenses we budget, but are small enough that we don’t have to plan for them. If one of us decides to surprise the other with the gift of a Lexus as a Christmas gift, that would have a significant impact on our household finances (If you want to see a great parody of those obnoxious ads click here. Warning – the language is NSFW). We would have to either cut back on other expenses, find a way to make significantly more money, or borrow against our future and make plans to pay for this for years to come, preventing us from using our money for other financial goals.

From your perspective, our consumption would be the equivalent of the day to day services that your level of government provides, such as police and fire services or payments to retirees. Our car or home would be your long term projects, such as building bridges or highways. As for the Lexus, that is everything that you have planned that you don’t have in the budget. Examples of these would be wars, natural disasters, or Obamacare. Sure, if you spend too much you can just raise taxes and rely on unrealistic revenue forecasts from a tax base that your laws incentivise to shrink. Or, if you spend spend recklessly you can just tell people not to worry and that we can just pay for it down the road or punish the wealthy.

Here is the problem with unfunded liabilities – they ultimately have to be paid back, and those payments mean that in the future you will have less to consume or invest. If Sister Babe and I now have a $700 monthly Lexus payment that’s money that we don’t have for vacations, for funding our retirement, paying off the car we already have, or, heaven forbid, forcing Brother Bob to cut his beer consumption.

The same goes for you. The beauty from where you’re sitting is that the pain is spread over many people and your constituents are so used to paying you taxes without question it goes largely unnoticed. But ultimately the debts have to be paid back. I believe it was the writers at Cafe Hayek who defined an unfunded liability as a tax on future generations that will have to be repaid either by raising taxes or inflating the currency. A few years ago I got to hear Ben Stein Speak when he got in front of the crowd and said, “Bueller… Bueller…”. No, he actually didn’t say that but what he did offer was a great definition for our soaring deficits – “Financial grandchild abuse.”

A few years ago Chris Christie was elected governor of New Jersey, surprising many that a conservative Republican could win in such a blue state. The people of New Jersey got fed up with the leadership of one of the best financial minds that Democrats could produce in John Corzine. The state had (and still does) face some serious budget issues, but Christie was the one who was given the task of dealing with the problem. The Democrats in the state legislature naturally proposed taxes on the wealthy to pay for these, which Christie rightly vetoed as soon as the bill reached his desk. New Jersey already suffers from one of the highest tax burdens among the states, and only neighboring New York’s even more oppressive taxes keep more people from North Jersey from fleeing the state. Christie had to make cuts to the budget, and one of the larger outlays that New Jersey has is to its bloated public sector workers. Specifically he targeted the teachers’ union, making the unreasonable demands that they fund part of their pensions and health care – you know, like everyone else has to do. This and other spending cuts made Christie quite unpopular in New Jersey, but at the end of the day who’s fault is the state’s terrible financial condition? Was it the man who caused the problem or the man who enacted the painful solution?

Sadly, in your world these promises get you re-elected until the bill finally comes due. Or when you finally get thrown out of office you can fail upward into some think-tank or high paying lobbying job. And of course, we get stuck with the bill. Going back to Cafe Hayek’s definition, any deficit spending that you commit is nothing more than a tax increase that you haven’t bothered to pass yet. If you want a great example, look at what happened just recently when all of the president’s sycophants in the media were baying over Mitt Romney’s tax returns. The debt ceiling was quietly raised by $1.2 trillion dollars. Using a rough total US population of 308 million people, that averages out to a tax increase of $3,896 for every man, woman and child in America.

And if you think we can get around that tax increase that the president just passed by simply demanding that the wealthy pay their “fair share”, think again. Declaration Entertainment’s Bill Whittle does a great video walking through Iowahawk’s analysis of how much of an impact on the debt we would have by confiscating private wealth. If you have five minutes it’s well worth watching.

To shoot down another argument supporting deficit spending we can look at every lefty’s favorite economist, Paul Krugman. By calculating that most of our federal debt is held by American entities, whether it be private citizens, banks, etc. the debt is meaningless because we“owe it to ourselves”. This is a perfect illustration of why it is dangerous to listen to people with grand ideas and minimal experience in the real world. An old coworker of mine gave me a phrase I love to use, Krugman is “buzzword compliant but experience deficient.” When you’re looking at the world from eight miles high it’s easy to make assumptions about a big picture without realizing that the big picture is made up of an incredible number of small moving parts. Every bit of that debt that “we owe to ourselves” is exactly that – it is owed to some person who is working under the assumption that at some point they will be paid back for the loan they made. Yes, the borrowee can take a loan from someone else to pay it but at some point there is an end where the debt has to be paid.

To show this point of owing to ourselves with a real life example we can look at an example from my past of betting on football with friends. When we were in 6th grade my buddy Richard (not his real name) sat behind me in Sunday CCD class. I would always tear out of the newspaper the latest betting lines and we would pass the paper back and forth negotiating which games we would bet on and at the end of class we would come to an agreement as to which games each would have. We were twelve years old, so our big stakes betting was a quarter or fifty cents per game. Every Tuesday morning when the gaming week ended after the Monday night contest we would settle our debt on the playground with the loser paying what he owed. If I remember correctly I trounced him pretty well that season, having an advantage for the year of being up around $6 after the Super Bowl. Being a good sporting friend I offered double or nothing on the following week’s Pro Bowl all-star game, which Richard won – easy come, easy go.

In contrast, I started a new job just over a year after graduating college. A coworker who I’ll call Charles suggested we bet each other on some of the weekend pro football games. This was probably the first time I was betting on football since my days with Richard, so I gladly accepted. This time was different though – I got out to an early lead in the season, but instead of paying each week Richard suggested we apply whatever he owed toward next week’s games. This kept up until I was going out of town one weekend and asked Richard to pay up. At this point he got indignant and said that he bets for friendship and that he was annoyed that I suggested that he pay. Being that he was a coworker bodily harm would have been inappropriate, so I took that opportunity to realize that I was better off without this goon in my life. So for the $10 or $20 that this cost me I gained the ability to immediately send this fool scurrying away whenever he tried to start a non job related conversation.

The point of these stories is that “we owe it to ourselves” only holds up if it is never expected that the original money be paid back. And that money doesn’t get to to, or from, this amorphous being known as “ourselves”. It’s made up of individuals, and at some point no matter how much our government bullies the banks and other institutions to buy its debt this shell game won’t go on forever because it can’t. Anyone remember the bank runs of the 1930′s from your history books or the last time you saw “It’s a Wonderful Life”? This is what happens when a few clever individuals realize they better move quickly if they want to get the debt that’s owed to them back. Then more and more people will figure it out, and the result is not going to be pretty.

There is actually one other way to pay down our deficits other than ruinous tax increases or hyper-inflation , and that’s by spurring the private sector to grow faster than the government that feeds off of it. No parasites can indefinitely grow faster than its host without killing both, yet leftists seem to be in love with gorging government growth for some improved economy that becomes their bizarro version of “Waiting for Godot.” Dubya partially got this, which was how, despite his “irresponsible tax cuts” government tax receipts hit all time highs. Of course, that doesn’t excuse his decision to start spending like a liberal.

We need to start taking a hard look at how you’ve plundered our economy, and we need to start having those painful conversations right now about how much we’re going to need to sacrifice thanks to your selfishness. Bernie Madoff’s name has become almost synonymous for large scale financial rip-offs, yet the $65 Billion that he cost the people who believed in him is is only how much more you take from us in one month – and that’s only at the federal level. And frighteningly enough, while you no doubt agree with us that Madoff belongs behind bars, you probably have the nerve and gall to think that we should be thanking you.

So spare us the talking points that Obama has “given” us these massive tax cuts. Since coming into office the President and his fellow Democrats have increased our federal debt by $3.5 Trillion to $14.2 Trillion in just three years – that’s a tax increase of $11,363 per citizen.

Naturally, I’m picking on Barry O. since he is the one at the helm right now. Don’t think that I’m letting our last president off the hook today. During his eight years in office Bush presided over deficits that increased to $5 Trillion dollars – using my formula above that’s a tax increase of $16,233 for each of us. So you’re on the right track when you tell us that Bush’s reckless policies hurt our country, but it’s not his tax cuts, it’s his tax increases that hurt us. We all agree that Bernie Madoff’s $65 Billion rip-off was criminal. What is it that makes his actions criminal and yours noble? You’d better be ready to answer that, and soon.

OK, that’s enough for today. I know that I was a lot rougher on you than in previous lessons, but sometimes tough love is necessary. But in the words of the great Michael Muir, “And if I offended you, oh I’m sorry but maybe you needed to be offended…” Mr. Muir had a bit more to say on the subject, but in the name of the new civility those words won’t be reprinted in this post. If you are interested you can hear the rest of his musings by clicking here .

“Who the H*** you callin’ fiscally irresponsible? You wouldn’t know what fiscal responsibility was if Milton Friedman was eating Fruit Loops on your front porch!”

The next lesson is only going to be somewhat better for you, as we explain why the unintended consequences of your actions often cause more harm than good. This next chapter will be a bonus section for journalists – never again will you have to type the word “unexpectedly” when explaining why jobless claims increase under President Obama! Next up:

Chapter 9: Unintended Consequences – Bonus Section for Journalists!

Previous Lessons:

Lesson One: It’s Not Your Money

Lesson Two: Intro to Microeconomics, or Why Prices Matter

Lesson Three: Intro to Macroeconomics. or So that’s Where Government Fits In!

Lesson Four: You Don’t Create Jobs – It’s Time to Get Over FDR! 

Lesson Four A: By Definition the Government Can Not Create Wealth

Lesson Five: Businesses are Greedy – That’s Not Necessarily a Bad Thing! 

Lesson Six: You are Greedy – That is a Bad Thing!

Lesson Seven: You Don’t Invest; You Spend

At last Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast Obama claimed that his policies are motivated by “God’s command to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’.” He then conflated this law of love with the golden rule, and made a blatantly dishonest claim about Islam:

I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato

In fact, Islam repeatedly and explicitly rejects the law of love, teaching instead a law of hate.

When Jesus was asked “who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29), he answered (via the parable of the good Samaritan) that everyone is everyone’s neighbor. Islam, in contrast, instructs Muslims to be good only to other Muslims. Koran, verse 48.29:

Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and those with him are firm of heart against the unbelievers, compassionate among themselves.

Verse 3.28 says that Muslims can only pretend to befriend infidels:

Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of precaution, that ye may Guard yourselves from them.

Of course we are very familiar with this in practice, as one revealed terror-plotter after another is described by surprised neighbors and co-workers as the nicest guy.

“That” Golden Rule vs. “The” Golden Rule

I guess Obama can call the law of love “that Golden Rule” if he wants, but there actually is a corollary of the law love (implied by the law of love but not implying it) that is called THE Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). There is a hadith in Islam (a reported saying of Muhammad) that is similar in form to the Golden Rule, but opposite in substance. It only calls for goodwill towards other Muslims:

None of you will have faith till he wishes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.

Bukhari 1.2.13, translated by M. Muhsin Khan.

Preceding hadiths back up Kahn’s non-universalist translation of the Muslim version of the Golden Rule. Bukhari 1.2.10 reads:

The Prophet said, “A Muslim is the one who avoids harming Muslims with his tongue and hands…”

In Islam the principle of reciprocity is extended only between Muslims, which makes it a principle, not of reciprocity at all, but of bigotry and prejudice. Islam is the only religion of any significance that does not embrace a universal principle of reciprocity.

Islam rejects even the idea of cooperation. Koran, verse 9.28:

O ye who believe! Truly the Pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.

i.e. Go broke rather than have dealings with infidels.

Not loving: the Koran’s endless instructions to subjugate and kill infidels

Verse 9.29:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

Another murderous verse (Koran 9.5) is the infamous “verse of the sword,” so central to traditional Islamic doctrine:

Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush.

Etcetera ad nauseum.

Well meaning left-wing multiculturalists convince themselves that these verses are no worse, and no more relevant, than God’s Old Testament instructions to the Jews to annihilate one people after another on their mission to conquer the promised land, but those were not universal instructions to conquer everybody. They are framed as specific permissions from God to attack a specific people at a specific place and time. In accordance with this specificity, these Bible verses have rarely if ever been used as a justification for aggressive conquest.

Not all Christians have always heeded the law of love in its properly universal Christian form, but that was no fault of the Bible, while to Christianity’s great credit its various churches have all long since dedicated themselves to understanding and following the law of love as well as flawed human beings are able, and Judaism has done the same.

Decades before Jesus declared that the commandments to love God and to Love your neighbor are all the law and the prophets, Rabbi Hillel had said the same about the golden rule:

“What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary.”

Orthodox Islam, in contrast, is aggressively carrying its law of hatred and violent aggression to every corner of the globe.

Our taqiyyist president

Obama quite obviously “don’t know much about history,” and “don’t know much about a science book,” but he does know the Koran. He studied it for years as a child and even took classes in “menjaji,” or Koran recitation in Arabic, which is the gold standard of fundamentalist Islamic education.

Hatred of the infidel is not hidden in Islam. It is the essence of it. No one can study Islam at all without comprehending this, and Obama surely does comprehend it. His claim that Islam embraces the law of love can only be a strategic lie, what in Islam is called taqiyya, and the fact that he seems to be engaging in taqiyya is pretty good evidence that Barack Hussein Obama actually is Muslim and is using the Oval Office to promote Islamic supremacism.

Obama’s claim that he is Christian, not Muslim, is not probative because Islam’s very first instruction to converts is that they should lie about their religion. Tabari 8.23 (one of the hadiths, or reported sayings of Muhammad):

en Nu’aym came to the Prophet. ‘I’ve become a Muslim, but my tribe does not know of my Islam; so command me whatever you will.’ Muhammad said, ‘Make them abandon each other if you can so that they will leave us; for war is deception.’

If Obama is Muslim, he would lie about it. Muslims who live amongst Christians are supposed to pretend that they are Christian, if by doing so they can advance the cause of Islamic conquest.

In one set of hadiths, Muhammad asks who will murder a man whose poetry Muhammad finds offensive. He then grants a volunteer (Muhammad bin Maslama) permission to lie to the victim in order to get close enough to do the deed, and the volunteer proceeds to pretend that he has turned against Muhammad (i.e. that he is no longer a Muslim). This is regarded by orthodox Islam as model behavior.

In sum, Obama is certainly lying about Islam, and hence is almost certainly an orthodox Muslim who embraces the Islamic law of hate. So what else is new? Honestly, we knew this before the 2008 election.

(As for the sheer destructiveness of the policies that Obama claims to be required by love, don’t be such a wuss: “You’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.”)

What is Mitt Romney doing in the Republican Party? (Although a better question might by why has the Republican Party strayed so far to the left that a guy like Mitt Romney could be its standard bearer…)

Everyone knows the story of Mitt Romney. He ran Bain Capital and financed a number of new businesses and helped rescue others. True, he and Bain failed a few times, but Bain Capital did what it was supposed to do, which is make money for its shareholders. At the end of the day Bain Capital was a net plus in that it actually produced prosperity (and jobs) for a significant number of people, and that accomplishment cannot be obviated simply because they could not rescue every firm they took a position in.

In 1994 Romney sought to unseat Ted Kennedy from the US Senate but lost as Kennedy pilloried him for lacking core (political) convictions. The fact that he had difficulty establishing a coherent message didn’t help. He lost badly. In 2002 he headed west to manage the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By all accounts he did a tremendous job and accomplished the financial equivalent of a perfect game, making the Olympics profitable for the host city.

Then of course there was his stint as governor of one of the bluest states in the union, Massachusetts. Like Scott Brown, a Republican in Teddy Kennedy’s neighborhood can be expected to be a RINO, and Romney certainly fit the bill. On a variety of issues both social and economic Romney was… shall we say purple in his approach. But at the end of the day he was more conservative than his predecessor in one of America’s most liberal states.

Add to that the fact that he’s a good looking guy with a great family and he seems like a poster child for putting Barack Obama in the unemployment line. It’s claimed he’s the Republican who can deliver Massachusetts and other key states like as Pennsylvania, Florida and probably Ohio and Nevada.

The problem is, he won’t.

When conservatives stand by conservative ideals, when conservatives clearly and coherently articulate the conservative principles of limited government, fiscal restraint and low taxes, they win. Not sure? In the three Reagan elections (counting Bush-41 in ’88 as an extension of Reagan’s policies) the GOP garnered 54% of the popular vote and beat the Democrats by an average of 11.9%. Contrast that with the elections since Reagan, beginning with Bush 41’s second run. Over the course of those five elections, the GOP has garnered an average of 44.4% of the vote while the Democrats earned an average of 48.3%. The GOP went from an average of 11.9% ahead to an average deficit of 4.4%. That is a 15 point swing in the wrong direction. What’s the difference? Solid conservative vs. milquetoast moderate. Unfortunately Mittens Romney is an extension of that milquetoast strategy.

Ominously, while 2012 may be the most important American election in a century, the two candidates seeking the White House are not going to be particularly distinguishable to voters – if we assume Mittens gets the nomination. Everyone knows that Barack Obama is a statist with socialist & populist instincts. Romney, in slight contrast, may be a capitalist, but on government policy he’s not enormously different. He supported the government’s TARP bailouts of the banks, he regularly plays the populist card of middle class tax cuts while arguing for increasing taxes on the rich, and of course there is RomneyCare, his signature achievement in Massachusetts that was literally the blueprint for the thing he rails against at every whistle-stop event: ObamaCare. Then there is his 59 point tax plan which does little to streamline the tax code and of course penalizes those earning over $200,000 a year. Finally there is his bizarre suggestion last week that the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation, something even our Socialist in Chief has not suggested. (Is it possible that the financial genius Mitt has no clue about how actual economics work?)

At this critical time when the United States is so clearly heading down the road to perdition what the country needs is someone to stand up on the biggest soapbox he can find and sing the praises of the capitalist system and make a clear and articulate argument for small, constitutional, limited government. We need someone to inspire and challenge the American people to throw off the yoke of the nanny state and pick themselves up by their bootstraps and in doing so become the economic vanguard of the world once again. Unfortunately, what we get instead is a GOP candidate who is in many respects largely indistinguishable from his statist, redistributionist opponent.

There is an old saying that you can’t fight something with nothing. In the case of Mitt Romney the GOP is hoping to fight the omnipresent government type Obama with the slightly less onerous, big government type Romney. Conservatives despise Barack Obama and they would likely turn out to vote if the GOP were to trot out Mickey Mouse to run against him. They won’t require the GOP to light a fire under them to get them to the polls. The middle sea of “moderates” on the other hand won’t respond to nothing. If the mass of largely disengaged Americans who are not political junkies finds that there is little or nothing to distinguish the candidates from one another then they will likely remain on the sidelines and not bother to vote. In a tight race intensity is the key to success. As such, Romney is a losing candidate. As can be seen by the fervency of the not-Romney elements of the GOP, the anemic turnout in Florida and Romney’s canned speeches and uninspiring debate performances, Mitt Romney is incapable of stirring the animal spirits of the base, never mind the general public.

Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of facing off against Mittens. Knowing that Romney is incapable of articulating or defending strong conservative principals or even inspiring his own party – never mind the muddling middle – Obama can do what he does best: demagogue Republicans (up and down the ticket) and inspire his base with populist platitudes that are like blood in the water to the left. The result will not only be another four years of Barack Obama, but it will likely mean something of a bloodbath in the down ticket races as well, from the House to the neighborhood dog catcher.

Mitt Romney may be the candidate who finally puts an end to a Republican Party that has outlived its usefulness and ushers in a truly conservative Tea Party driven party. One might wish that GOP good riddance. The only question is however, will the United States as we know it survive another four years of Barack Obama so that there’s something left for the Tea Party calvary to come to the rescue of?

Liberals:

President Obama, for about the 100th time: “We can’t go back to the policies that led to the recession.”

President Obama at the annual prayer breakfast: “When I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it’ll make the economy stronger for everybody.  But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years, and I believe in God’s command to love thy neighbor as thyself…And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.  But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ It mirrors the Islamic belief that those who’ve been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others.”

The name of President Obama‘s first budget: “A New Era of Responsibility.” It has a deficit of a little over a trillion dollars.

President Obama: “Lenders sold loans to families who couldn’t afford them. Banks packaged those mortgages up and traded them for phony profits. It drove up prices and created an unsustainable bubble that burst – and left millions of families who did everything right in a world of hurt.”  It is against the law for a mutual fund, for instance, to tell you they invest in one set of investment products, but to actually invest in a different set of products.   If banks could do this, then why?  What legislation allowed them to do this?  If this is really what happened, at what point are these people arrested?

President Obama: “Right now, there are more than 10 million homeowners in this country who, because of a decline in home prices that is no fault of their own, owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Now, it is wrong for anyone to suggest that the only option for struggling, responsible homeowners is to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom. I don’t accept that. None of us should.”  Investments go up and down.  At what time should investments involve no risk?

Lyrics by Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.) and Terisa Griffin, with “apologies to Al Green.”  This is written to President Obama, the man they adore.

“We’re . We’re so in love with you .
We’re going to help you make it through .
By turning the red states blue .

You make us feel so darn proud .
We want to shout it out loud .
Let’s bring the country together .
Supporting you whether . whether times are good or bad . happy or sad
Let’s bring the country together .
Supporting you whether . whether times are good or bad . happy or sad
Let’s . Let’s stay together.”

Michelle Obama: “And when our kids get older and they graduate from school, we all know how hard it is for them to find jobs, let alone jobs with insurance.  And that’s why, as part of health reform, kids can now stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26 years old.”

President Obama, following a meeting with Georgia’s President Saakashvili, to reporters: “[O]ne of the first things that I did was express my appreciation for the institution-building that’s been taking place in Russia – in Georgia.”  Georgia is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary of independence from Russia.

President Obama: “We’re starting to see some signs that the economy is picking up. We’ve created 22 million jobs over the last—or 3 million jobs over the last 22 months.”

Michelle Obama: “We are blessed to have someone not just of his intellectual caliber but with such a strong grounding of values that all of us identify with – these basic American values that have made our country great and will continue to make us the strongest country in the world.”

Michelle Obama: “In the last 3 years, we’ve worked hard to get out of this mess and we’ve made some remarkable progress.”

Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “[President Obama is] going to run on his remarkable record of accomplishment.”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “You know why I’m not enjoying it [the Republican primary]?  I’ll tell you.  As a Floridian, and I’m here in the state of Florida as we speak, as a Floridian their extremism, their callous disregard for undocumented immigrants.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year – it’s done, we don’t need to do it.”  I believe this is the 3rd year without a formal budget in Congress.  The House did pass a budget last year that was voted down by the Senate.  The claim is, the agreement to raise the debt ceiling functions as a budget.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “I’ve done earmarks all my career, and I’m happy I’ve done earmarks all my career. They’ve helped my state, and they’ve helped different projects around the country.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer when it appeared that the breast cancer awareness group Susan G. Komen to pull funding grants from Planned Parenthood: “I was not born yesterday, as most of your viewers can tell, and the fact is, I’m reminded of the McCarthy era.”

Senator Barbara Boxer on the Komen’s Foundation changing their minds and continuing giving grants to Planned Parenthood: “women’s health triumphed over right-wing politics…health care for our people should never, ever be politicized from any side.”  To reinforce that politics should not be a part of healthcare, Boxer and 25 other liberal U.S. senators made the issue political with their letter to Komen.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi: “It was an unfortunate situation but it was dealt with in a short period of time, [and] I commend the Susan G. Komen foundation for seeing the light on this…[It] just goes to show you, when women speak out, women win. Women’s health has a big victory this morning.”

Attorney General Eric Holder: “ATF‘s ability to stem the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico suffers from a lack of effective enforcement tools.  Unfortunately, in 2011, a majority of House Members – including all members of the majority on this Committee – voted to keep law enforcement in the dark when individuals purchase multiple semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and long guns – like AK-47s – in gun shops in four southwest-border states.”  So, the ATF’s Fast & Furious Operation, where guns were allowed to walk, without being tracked, into Mexico, is ultimately a problem of weak gun control laws?  Am I understanding the AG correctly?

White House spokesman Jay Carney: “[The President] absolutely stands by the attorney general [Eric Holder] and thinks he’s doing an excellent job.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano: “The Obama administration has undertaken the most serious and sustained actions to secure our borders in our nation’s history.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “You’d think that if a congresswoman got shot in the head, that would have changed Congress’ views [about gun legislation]…This past, this week, even though the murder rate in New York is so much lower than almost every big city, we still had a cop shot last week with a gun that somebody had even though the federal laws prohibited that person from having a gun.”

Representative Barney Frank: “Yes, we have a deficit. It is a very large deficit. Much of it incurred because of the policies of President Bush. Supported by Republican majorities in Congress.  I’m told, I didn’t read it…the bill we passed yesterday said the tax cuts under George Bush did not add to the deficit. Um, that is Marxist Reasoning—Chico Marxist reasoning. It reminds me of the time in one of the movies where Groucho caught Chico red-handed and Chico denying that he had done it said  ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?’ ” The same could be said about today’s Obama economy; who are you going to believe?  Barney Frank or your own eyes?

Rosa Brooks, formerly a “Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy” in the Obama administration: “Any honest diplomat will tell you that American power and global influence is waning, and if we shy away from acknowledging that fact, we’ll only speed up the process.  By many measures, we’ve hollowed out the American dream: American life expectancy ranks well below that of other industrialized democracies, and the same is true for infant mortality rates and elementary school enrollment rates. We have the highest documented per capita incarceration rate in the world. And as the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped point out, we have greater income inequality in this country than in any other state in the developed world – and most states in the developing world.” Interestingly enough, in this piece that she wrote, she was not identified as having any connection with the Obama administration.

From the UN:

Milos Koterec, President of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations: “No one should live below a certain income level.  Everyone should be able to access at least basic health services, primary education, housing, water, sanitation and other essential services.”

Jens Wandel, Deputy Director of the United Nations Development Program: “We will need a modest but long-term way to finance this transformation.  One idea which we could consider is a minimal financial transaction tax (of .005 percent). This will create $40 billion in revenue.”

Liberals “It’s all about race…”

FoxNews’s Juan Williams: “The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are ‘entitlement society’ – as used by Mitt Romney – and ‘poor work ethic’ and ‘food stamp president’ – as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the ‘Founding Fathers’ and the ‘Constitution’ also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core ‘old-fashioned American values.’ ”

Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver: “In the last few days, both Gov. Romney and Speaker Gingrich have been guilty of saying things that are not helpful to a society begging for racial inclusion.  Whether they are intentional or not, I’m not 100 percent certain; I do know that it doesn’t matter in many cases. It’s just unfortunate and it tends to divide.”

MSNBC anchor Rev. Al Sharpton on Newt Gingrich: “He’s going after a southern mentality, and racial allusions, always wrapped around when he refers to the president, when he talks about this food stamp stuff.”

Charles Rangel: “The government doesn’t have the racism and discrimination that the private sector enjoys.”

Piers Morgan to Jerry Springer, asking him to run for political office “It is time you did your duty for your country.”

MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow: “Newt Gingrich brought back the food stamps president thing – and then tonight, he went to `President Obama ought to stop singing, ought to stop being the Entertainer-in-Chief.’ Sort of caricaturing him in a way that calls out to minstrelsy.”

Al Sharpton added: “These are – Newt Gingrich is many things, stupid is not one of them. He knows exactly what he’s saying, he knows exactly who he’s playing to, when you look at that map, when you deal with the northern border of Florida, which is southern Alabama and all of those states where they [sic] headed he knows what card he’s playing.”

Celebrities:

Economist Barbara Streisand: “Barack Obama has not put anyone on food stamps.  The grossly irresponsible and greedy practices of those on Wall Street, which led to the subsequent crash of the housing market, created the most severe recession our country has experienced since the Great Depression (which Obama inherited from George W. Bush when he entered office).  These events, along with the continuous deregulation of our financial sector, conspired to make a record number of people eligible for government food assistance. ”

The Compliant Obama Press Corps:

NBC chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson on Nightly News with anchor Brian Williams: “Add to that a world warming because of climate change and it stacks the deck, Dr. Meehl says, against a traditional winter.”  On the bottom of the screen was the headline “Where’s Winter?”

Thompson, on another NBC show: “Now scientists are unwilling to pin any one weather event on climate change but they say there’s no question that our warming world is shifting the odds against a traditional winter, winters as we have known them.”  The record cold winter occurring in Europe apparently has not reached their desk yet.

In the report that followed, added to the alarmism as she declared: “This most unusual January ending on a remarkably mild note across the country….2,890 daily high temperature records broken or tied.” She later cited climatologist and global warming proponent Dr. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research

“Financial expert” Suze Orman on HBO: “I think he not only should run on his record, so he can run on his record, but let’s take a look at this. We have jobs. You can’t do anything without a job. In 2010, we averaged about a million jobs. Okay?”
Bill Maher, Host: “A million jobs?”
Orman: “A million jobs that were created. In 2011, it was 1.8 million jobs. Now, in 2012, we are average 200,000 jobs a month that are being created. So he can run on his record. The jobs are coming up. And he’s done so much in the past four years I can’t even tell you.”

Bill Maher: “The numbers that came out today, government lost 14,000 jobs. We’ve added private sector jobs, 270,000. We’ve lost 500,000 public sector jobs since Obama took office and added 3.7 million private sector jobs.”  Perhaps this is based upon Martin Bashir claiming that Obama has created 3 million jobs and Bill added on the .7 because it sounds more real and official.  However, when Obama took office, there were 110,985,000 private sector workers. As announced by the Labor Department Friday, that number currently stands at 110,436,000, a decline of 549,000.

This chart may not be fully comprehensible at first, because we are used to red and blue standing for Republicans and Democrats.  However, the Red represents “the Obama recovery” and the Blue represents the results of preceding recoveries. Although this is very important stuff, have you seen any news service actually report this?
FoxNews Alan Colmes: “The next day you have Trump endorsing him [Romney], one of the most notorious billionaires.”  Trump is a notorious billionaire; are you kidding me?

CNN’s John King: “Let’s just look at one more as we come down the line here. If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He’s a Mormon, and he won big among Mormons. He won 9 out of every 10 votes among Mormons.”

MSNBC’s Bill Burton: “Reagan wouldn’t have a chance in this Republican primary right now.”
Alex Wagner: “I think he’d be a Democrat probably.”  After castigating Reagan for decades, liberals have found that he continues to be popular; so, why not just claim that he is one of them?  That’s not any more dishonest than anything else that they say.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: “Rick Santorum says that he would like states to be able to make contraception illegal.”  Not even close to being true.

MSNBC newsman Chris Matthews takes a look back in recent history and rewrites it somewhat: “There is a real level of national hatred of the president that I hadn’t seen before, certainly not under Clinton, or under Dubya.  The hatred, the Hitler mustaches, all that stuff. I haven’t seen that before.”  Google “Bush Hitler” under images.

CNN headline: Michelle Obama and Ellen Degeneres show off their guns (this is a reference to their strong arms, not their weapons)

MSNBC‘s Martin Bashir: “Many Republicans will say didn’t democrats attack George Bush in exactly the same way. what’s your response to that?”
DNC spokesman Brad Woodlouse: “I don’t remember anything that equates from official Democratic Party. I mean, of course there are interest groups and people have their say, but I don’t remember anything coming from Democratic Party about George W. Bush being equated to a terrorist or George W. Bush being equated to somebody who has been accused of manslaughter. I don’t remember anybody questioning some of the things about George W. Bush that have been questioned about the president. I don’t remember an opposing Governor wagging his or her finger in president George W. Bush’s face.”
And Bashir’s follow up question was….?  In liberal television, one rarely questions preposterous lies.

MSNBC Contributor Karen Hunter questions author of The Obamas: “I haven’t read the book . . . don’t plan on reading it. . . What was your motivation for doing it?”

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton carefully avoiding the “A” word: “And I don’t think people understand how vile towards women’s right to choose, women’s right to deal with their own options, that the right wing has become in this day.”

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry shows how a masterful pro can talk about abortion without ever saying the “A” word: “Well look: this would have been a masterful strategy, had it worked, right?  Because what it did was to separate out good girls from bad girls, which has always been an effective way to limit some women from having having the same freedoms and opportunities, right? So if breast cancer is separated out completely from Planned Parenthood; if Planned Parenthood can’t provide breast-cancer screenings, cervical-cancer screenings.  If all they’re doing is providing reproductive choice opportunities like birth control and pregnancy terminations, then you can after them because those are the bad girls, those are the people who have done bad things.”

Occupy Oakland spokesperson at a press conference about the police: “I want to believe underneath those ridiculous war suits you are human.”

Another occupy Oakland:”To these monster with this riot gear, they don’t even look human, with this look in their eyes. Who cares if some windows are broken.”

Polk Award-Winning Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings: “Most journalists I know are liberal…Any journalist worth his salt often has a real moralistic kind of righteousness to them somewhere in their soul.”  Could I suggest that this is code for being a liberal bleeding heart?

Liberal civility:

Mike Malloy, former CNN employee, currently a leftist radio person when he heard that the Komen Foundation would not be giving money the Planned Parenthood: “So the fact the people are reacting to the Nazis that took over the Susan G. Komen Foundation, especially this Karen Handel freak that comes right out of Georgia…She is the type that would take every Jew in America and crucify `em. She is the type that would take, uh, every Muslim in America and execute ‘em.”

Politico’s Jonathan Martin on MSNBC as a part of their Florida election coverage: “Chuck, a lot of the counties in the Panhandle, in north Florida, the cracker counties, if you will . . . more resemble Georgia and Alabama than they do Florida.”

Eric Holder to a Puerto Rican Congressman during Fast and Furious hearing: “Maybe This is the way you do things in Idaho or wherever you are from.”  At least he didn’t call him a cracker.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz: “This is America being transformed right in front of our eyes…You don’t have to go very far to find your school district being gutted by the righties. You don’t have to go very far before you better be packing iron ’cause we ain’t got any cops left.”

Black radio host Thaddeus Matthews to Black GOP candidate: “Get your stupid ignorant ass outta my studio.  Another token-ass Negro that asks white folks to approve you.  Take your stupid ass on out my damn building…I don’t need to shake your hand…I’m scared because some of your whiteness might rub off on me.”

Crazy Muslims:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Why did they [the western powers] install the Zionist regime (Israel)?  To gain control over oil, as well as the popular and revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East…It is clear that this was a historical scheme.”

Egyptian cleric Sheik Abdallah Kamal: “I mentioned yesterday that the Prophet Muhammad married Aisha when she was six years old, and had sexual intercourse with her when she was nine years old. People might raise an eyebrow and ask how such a thing could be…In warm places, girls reach puberty at a very early age – generally at the age of 8 years. In cold places, girls’ puberty is delayed until the age of 21 years – as is the case in some cold countries.”

Sheik Bassam Al-Kayed, head of the Palestinian Islamic Scholars Association in Lebanon: “The Jew is a satan in human form. Allah inflicted the Jews upon humanity in its entirety, and especially upon the nation of Islam, including the early prophets and the Prophet Muhammad. The Jew is a satan in human form.”

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: “Threatening Iran and attacking Iran will harm America … Sanctions will not have any impact on our determination to continue our nuclear course … In response to threats of oil embargo and war, we have our own threats to impose at the right time…I have no fear of saying that we will back and help any nation or group that wants to confront and fight against the Zionist regime (Israel).”  In the same speech, he referred to Israel as a “cancer” which “will be cut.”

Ayatollah Khamenei: “In light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God, the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated.”

Majid Qadiri, head of the toy department at the Iranian Center for Early Childhood Development: “[Toys] have an evident influence on children. [It is harmful] to dress dolls in the best clothes of the best quality, in keeping with the culture that children see in cartoons and in the cinema. But if these are in keeping with our national and Islamic ideology, [our children] will not be subject to a cultural invasion.  This is what the Islamic world is dealing with today. It has been invaded by foreign dolls and toys, like Barbie dolls and others, which are sold to children. These dolls should not be bought, because they have an impact on the mentality of children, and when these children reach adolescence and can choose for themselves, they will find themselves in a situation where the invading culture is dominant.”

Ayatollah Khomeini: “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.”

Sunni scholar Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: “I think [the shari'a] should be implemented gradually. This is a law of the shari’a and a law of nature…I think that in the first five years, there should be no chopping off of hands.  This period should be dedicated to teaching things.  A transitional phase.”

Moderates/Affiliation Unknown:

Josephine Terry, the mother of slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, on Facebook: “Mr. Holder, how come you never say my son’s name? You never have. I’m actually tired of hearing your double talk in answering questions. What a joke you are. You know my son was a real AMERICAN, a WARRIOR, and a HERO, who was also protecting COWARD POLITICIANS like you.”

In a commercial for a Samsung tablet which features an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, one person says: “What? Another mysterious explosion in Iran?”  A large explosion is seen in the background.

Vice Prime Minister of Israel and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon: “Any [nuclear] facility protected by humans can be infiltrated by humans. It’s possible to strike all Iran’s facilities, and I say that out of my experience as IDF chief of staff.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta: “We could be fighting a land war in Korea, and suddenly Iran moves to close the Straits of Hormuz.  We’ve got to have the capability to be able to confront each adversary, to not only deter them, but defeat them. And we can do that with the force that we’ve put in place.”

Crosstalk:

President Obama: “So I want to send a clear message to Congress: Do not slow down the recovery that we’re on. Don’t muck it up. Keep it moving in the right direction.”

Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner: “With the president having ‘mucked up’ the economy pretty well over the last three years, we appreciate his perspective.”
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Bill O’Reilly asked what President Obama needed to do in order to get reelected.

Alan Colmes: “He has to get out there and explain in simple language what he has done and how he has helped the American people. And he has to get the progressives to vote.”

Bill O’Reilly:  “He’s got to get out there??  Those are the dumbest words I’ve heard in months!  Has he been cloistered in the basement for three years?  Did you even think about this segment at all, Colmes?”
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NBC’s David Gregory: Well, religious institutions, churches and the like, would be exempted, and there are states that have very similar rules to ensure the health and safety of, of women that they get covered in their workplace, whether it be a Catholic hospital or other kind of institution.

Newt Gingrich: Well, I mean, you, you just managed to precisely repeat the Obama administration’s line, which is also the American Civil Liberties Union line. The fact is what you’re saying is there cannot be a genuinely Catholic university, there cannot be a genuinely Catholic hospital, that in fact it will have to be subordinated to the rules of a secular government. I mean, I happen to oppose rules that, that have, for example, forced Catholic Adoption Services to be closed because they’re only willing to have adoptions for marriages between a man and a woman. There are states that now close that. I think that is a tremendous infringement of religious liberty. And I think you’re saying the same thing. You’re saying basically, “Oh, you can have the name on it, but you can’t actually be a Catholic institution. You can’t actually be an evangelical Christian institution. You can’t actually be an orthodox Jewish institution because we the secular government are going to impose on you.” I think that’s–I think this is a very profound moment for Americans to decide…

Gregory: And you predict a political cost for the president.

Gingrich: …do you really want to have a government impose on them?

Gregory: Do you predict a political cost for the president because of this?

Gingrich: What? Very substantial, yes. Because, because every American who cares about religious liberty, and I’ve been talking, for example, with evangelicals here in Nevada, every American who cares about religious liberty recognizes that from, from, from judges who say you, you can’t say a prayer in high school, you can’t–the New York City decision recently–you, you can’t rent an empty school building on Sunday morning–every time you turn around, secular government is closing in on and shrinking the right of religious liberty in America, and I think there are millions of people who are very disturbed by it.

Entire conversation and video here.
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The Daily Caller: “Do you think thought at this point, Harry Reid, yourself and President Obama should take ownership for the current state of the economy?”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (with a very long and rambling answer that has been edited here): “President Obama was a job creator by, on day one. I’ve probably said this to you before but just in case I think it bears repeating, a job creator from day one. In his inaugural address, he called for swift, bold action now; and one week and one day after his speech, the House of Representatives passed the economic Recovery Act, which even the CBO says has saved or created over 3 million jobs…We are in a very, very deep hole and that’s what we have to come out of. It’s not cyclical. It’s systemic. It’s structural, it’s very big and that’s why it was really important for us to have more job creation but as you know, once we didn’t have the 60th vote in the Senate, that was hard to do, even with the Democratic majority in the House and now of course, with the Republican majority in the House, [there's] no job agenda…Up until, I think, his last day in office, President Reagan was blaming his economic woes on President Jimmy Carter, who hadn’t been president for 8 years already. It’s not about – again, this president has been so professional, and by that I mean he understands the role that he has to play and the responsibility that he has.  So, with the given that he [Obama] got he has I think tried very hard to take us down the right path. . Blame it on the do-nothing Congress because they have obstructed so much in addition to the policies that that he inherited.”  Perhaps a little historic revisionism going on here?
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Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz tweeted, after hearing that Donald Trump would support Mitt Romney:  “Next up: Who is Snooki going to endorse?”

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, star of MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” later tweeted herself:  “I will not be voting for Chris Christie.”

Later Polizzi Tweeted. “I DEF don’t want a judgmental president who has NEVER met me in person . I’ll stick w Obama.”

Conservatives:

Senator Orin Hatch: “Mr. President, our nation faces grave challenges.  We are looking at our fourth straight trillion dollar deficit.  Our credit rating has been downgraded.  Public spending is out of control.  The nation demands leadership.  At some moments in our nation’s history, at moments of crisis, leaders have emerged, put partisanship aside, and worked to solve our greatest challenges.  Though our current President has compared himself to both Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, his leadership is falling well short of their examples.  Instead of taking the reins and making tough choices, when presented with our current fiscal crisis, he has decided to put politics first.  He always puts politics first.  Just this morning at the National Prayer Breakfast the President took what has always been a non-partisan opportunity for national unity and used it to promote his political agenda.  He suggested to the attendees that Jesus would have supported his latest tax-the-rich schemes.  With due respect to the President, he should stick to public policy.  I think most Americans would agree that the Gospels are concerned with weightier matters than effective tax rates.   As long as the President has decided to assume the role of theologian-in-chief, he would do well to put tax policy aside and consider the impact of one of his latest Obamacare mandates.  Secretary Sebelius‘ decision to force religious institutions – over the strong objections of churches and universities representing millions and millions of Americans – to provide insurance coverage for abortifacient drugs and contraceptives to their employees will require these groups to violate their deepest held religious beliefs.  The President’s comments this morning share more with political strategy than they do the religious beliefs of most Americans.  In 2008, the President declared that his nomination was the world historical moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.  Someone needs to remind the President that there was only one person who walked on water.  And he did not occupy the Oval Office.”

Charles Krauthammer: “Romney is late to his new ideology [conservatism] and he obviously doesn’t speak it very well.”

FoxNews commentator James Freeman of Romney: “We’ve learned he’s not an instinctive conservative.”

Mitt Romney: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich.. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”  The left has already been using Romney’s quote against him.

Mitt Romney: “My test is – is a program so critical that it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?”

Mitt Romney: “I happen to think it’s immoral for us to keep spending money we don’t have and passing on to our kids our obligations,”

Rep. Dan Burton on Fast&Furious documents that Eric Holder has not handed over to them: “I think you’re hiding behind something here that will not stand up. You ought to give us the documents.  There are 93,000 documents that you’re not giving this committee, you’re saying separation of power prevents you from doing that. That’s baloney. That’s just baloney.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions: “It’s been more than 1,000 days since Senate Democrats have offered a budget plan to the American people. Now, once again, the Senate’s ineffectual Democrat majority balks at the task of leadership.”

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum: “[Obama] made the claim that his policies of taxing the rich is authorized by the Bible, that he is doing what is biblically called for by taxing the rich, by having the government tax the rich.  Now, I’ve read the Bible, and I must have missed that passage.”

Greg Gutfeld on Komen withdrawing support for Planned Parenthood and then reinstating it: “It’s about political intimidation.”

Jen Kalaber, spokesman for Rep. Phil Gingrey who walked out of President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast: “He was disturbed and offended by the president’s use of prayer and reflection time for partisan politics and class warfare.  Rep. Gingrey enjoyed listening to the keynote speaker and found the breakfast to be inspiring until President Obama began politicking.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Take any person in this country who’s totally absorbed in pop culture. The big thing in their life is watching Entertainment Tonight. They vote. If they vote, we’re screwed. You know damn well they haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on. But that’s always been the case.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The vast majority of people on the minimum wage are teenagers, young people. If the minimum wage gets too high and then they start cracking down on interns, what’s the next place business will go? Illegal aliens.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The safety net contributes to poverty. It does not solve it.”

Rush Limbaugh: “I feel bad for Rachel Maddow. She was a Jeopardy question recently, I think it was Jeopardy, some game show on TV, and nobody knew who she was. None of the contestants had ever heard of her. That’s gotta be a blow, particularly when you work at MSNBC and you end up thinking that gazillions watch you every night.”

Rush Limbaugh: “When the government’s sole source of revenue outside printing it or borrowing it from the ChiComs is taxing the output of the private sector, how does it make any sense to put $800 billion into the private sector that can only come from the private sector in the first place?”

Rush Limbaugh: “After the elections, after November, we can look forward to a 1% GDP. That’s a recession, folks. The New York Times called 3.5% GDP a recession under Bush.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The Republican Party is hell-bent on making sure that the Tea Party (i.e., conservatives) do not conquer this party and end up controlling it or running it.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The federal government doesn’t have a dime until it takes it from people who produce it and earn it.  Pure and simple.  The federal government produces nothing.  Absolutely nothing.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The Republican establishment wants spending. They want active government, they want to be in charge of it. They’ll tinker with it on the margins, but they want to be inside the entire power structure. They don’t want to be at odds with the power structure in New York, in Washington, in the whole Northeastern Corridor.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Contrary to what many of you might believe, I do not have an out-sized ego. I don’t have really much of an ego at all. I frankly wish I had a bigger ego than I do. I don’t think that my endorsement is gonna change a whole lot of opinions.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Have you seen any evidence of any Republican going after Obama the way Republicans are going after each other?  You haven’t.”

Rush Limbaugh: “I don’t care who’s telling lies in the Republican campaign, they are pikers compared to what’s gonna happen when the Democrat campaign begins.”

Rush Limbaugh: “I’ve long maintained that whoever can articulate conservatism the most consistently, the most confidently and the happiest, is going to win this thing.  And that pretty much could overcome any of the negatives.”

Conservatives not making any sense:

When asked if he still supported automatic increases in the federal minimum wage to keep pace with inflation, Mitt Romney answered: “I haven’t changed my thoughts on that.”

From Conservative Review #214  (HTML)  (PDF)